On the Significance of Science and Art

science and art have certainly not ameliorated the condition of the workingman, if , indeed . significance, ought to be accessible to the people. Science may.
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In artibus et scientiis, tanquam in metalli fodinis, omnia novis operibus et ulterioribus progressibus circumstrepere debent But arts and sciences should be like mines, where the noise of new works and further advances is heard on every side. In scientia veritas, in arte honestas. In science truth, in art honour. Art is meant to disturb, science reassures. As translated by S. Appelbaum in Georges Braque Illustrated Notebooks: Nicht Kunst und Wissenschaft allein, Geduld will bei dem Werke sein.

Not Art and Science serve alone; Patience must in the work be shown. Lines for character Mephistopheles in Faust I. Notatio naturae, et animadversio perperit artem Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature. Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt, Hat auch Religion; Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt, Der habe Religion He who possesses science and art, Possesses religion as well; He who possesses neither of these, Had better have religion.

Cited in Max Jammer, Einstein and Religion , A theory is a supposition which we hope to be true, a hypothesis is a supposition which we expect to be useful; fictions belong to the realm of art; if made to intrude elsewhere, they become either make-believes or mistakes. The first part, about suppositions, appears in a paper read by G. If you know a primary source for the part on fictions and mistakes, please contact Webmaster.

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Aeroplanes are not designed by science, but by art in spite of some pretence and humbug to the contrary. I do not mean to suggest that engineering can do without science, on the contrary, it stands on scientific foundations, but there is a big gap between scientific research and the engineering product which has to be bridged by the art of the engineer.

After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well. All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. Architecture is of all the arts the one nearest to a science, for every architectural design is at its inception dominated by scientific considerations. The inexorable laws of gravitation and of statics must be obeyed by even the most imaginative artist in building. Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women.

The latter normally concerns itself with profit, the former with pleasure. In the coming age, art will fashion our entertainment out of new means of productivity in ways that will simultaneously enhance our profit and maximize our pleasure. In The Columbia World of Quotations The Photographs of Harold Edgerton , Art and science work in quite different ways: But, bad as it may sound, I have to admit that I cannot get along as an artist without the use of one or two sciences. In my view, the great and complicated things that go on in the world cannot be adequately recognized by people who do not use every possible aid to understanding.

Bertolt Brecht, John Willett trans. Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: Dingle, Memorable Quotations , Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live; science, everything that sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the most disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life.

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things. Arts and sciences in one and the same century have arrived at great perfection; and no wonder, since every age has a kind of universal genius, which inclines those that live in it to some particular studies; the work then, being pushed on by many hands, must go forward.

The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near. As yet, if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded, but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal. This is a fundamental weakness. Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience. In How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom , 4. Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage.


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But it is no less true that the same consciousness may at another time be so wholly possessed by the aesthetic appreciation as to exclude all thought of the scientific interpretation. The inability of a man of science to take the poetic view simply shows his mental limitation; as the mental limitation of a poet is shown by his inability to take the scientific view.

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The broader mind can take both. During human progress, every science is evolved out of its corresponding art. As coauthor with Frank W. Skinner, and Harold E. Wessman, Vocational Guidance in Engineering Lines , 6. Every writer must reconcile, as best he may, the conflicting claims of consistency and variety, of rigour in detail and elegance in the whole. The present author humbly confesses that, to him, geometry is nothing at all, if not a branch of art. Concluding remark in preface to Treatise on Algebraic Plane Curves , x. For just as musical instruments are brought to perfection of clearness in the sound of their strings by means of bronze plates or horn sounding boards, so the ancients devised methods of increasing the power of the voice in theaters through the application of the science of harmony.

Uti enim organa in aeneis laminis, aut corneis, diesi ad chordarum sonituum claritatem perficiuntur: For most scientists, I think the justification of their work is to be found in the pure joy of its creativeness; the spirit which moves them is closely akin to the imaginative vision which inspires an artist. Form your life humanly, and you have done enough: Fractals are patterns which occur on many levels. This concept can be applied to any musical parameter. I make melodic fractals, where the pitches of a theme I dream up are used to determine a melodic shape on several levels, in space and time.

I make rhythmic fractals, where a set of durations associated with a motive get stretched and compressed and maybe layered on top of each other. I make loudness fractals, where the characteristic loudness of a sound, its envelope shape, is found on several time scales. I even make fractals with the form of a piece, its instrumentation, density, range, and so on.

Interview on The Discovery Channel. As quoted by Benoit B. It is because science gives us the power of manipulating nature that it has more social importance than art. Science as the pursuit of truth is the equal, but not the superior, of art.

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Science as a technique, though it may have little intrinsic value, has a practical importance to which art cannot aspire. He that desireth to acquire any art or science seeketh first those means by which that art or science is obtained. He who posseses science and art, has religion; he who possesses neither science nor art, let him get religion.

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars. Quoted in Sidney Perkowitz, Empire of Light , 1.


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    • I agree with Schopenhauer that one of the most powerful motives that attracts people to science and art is the longing to escape from everyday life. Quoted, without citation in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Feb , If you know a primary source, please contact Webmaster.

    I do believe that a scientist is a freelance personality. I do believe that science, for me, is very close to art. The Inner World of Scientists , I do not conceive of any manifestation of culture, of science, of art, as purposes in themselves. I think the purpose of science and culture is man. I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance.

    He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of a scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts. Crash , , Introduction. In letter to H. If any layman were to ask a number of archaeologists to give, on the spur of the moment, a definition of archaeology, I suspect that such a person might find the answers rather confusing.

    He would, perhaps, sympathize with Socrates who, when he hoped to learn from the poets and artisans something about the arts they practised, was forced to go away with the conviction that, though they might themselves be able to accomplish something, they certainly could give no clear account to others of what they were trying to do. Opening statement in lecture at Columbia University 8 Jan , 'Archaeology'. Published by the Columbia University Press Now write up exactly what you will be doing during the three years of your grant.

    Because research means going into the unknown. If you know what you are going to do in science, then you are stupid! This is like telling Michelangelo or Renoir that he must tell you in advance how many reds and how many blues he will buy, and exactly how he will put those colors together. Imagination comes first in both artistic and scientific creations, but in science there is only one answer and that has to be correct. Essays on Science and Scientists , In all spheres of science, art, skill, and handicraft it is never doubted that, in order to master them, a considerable amount of trouble must be spent in learning and in being trained.

    As regards philosophy, on the contrary, there seems still an assumption prevalent that, though every one with eyes and fingers is not on that account in a position to make shoes if he only has leather and a last, yet everybody understands how to philosophize straight away, and pass judgment on philosophy, simply because he possesses the criterion for doing so in his natural reason.

    In early times, medicine was an art, which took its place at the side of poetry and painting; to-day, they try to make a science of it, placing it beside mathematics, astronomy, and physics. In general, art has preceded science. Men have executed great, and curious, and beautiful works before they had a scientific insight into the principles on which the success of their labours was founded. Art was the mother of Science. In pure mathematics we have a great structure of logically perfect deductions which constitutes an integral part of that great and enduring human heritage which is and should be largely independent of the perhaps temporary existence of any particular geographical location at any particular time.

    The enduring value of mathematics, like that of the other sciences and arts, far transcends the daily flux of a changing world. In fact, the apparent stability of mathematics may well be one of the reasons for its attractiveness and for the respect accorded it. In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them. And in scientific inquiry, at any rate, it is to that one or two that we must look for light and guidance.

    Collected essays , Vol. But saying this does not disparage those great men to whom the human race owes so much in contrast to those whom nature has endowed for fine art. For the scientists' talent lies in continuing to increase the perfection of our cognitions and on all the dependent benefits, as well as in imparting that same knowledge to others; and in these respects they are far superior to those who merit the honour of being called geniuses.

    For the latter's art stops at some point, because a boundary is set for it beyond which it cannot go and which has probably long since been reached and cannot be extended further. The Critique of Judgement , trans. Meredith , Indeed, we need not look back half a century to times which many now living remember well, and see the wonderful advances in the sciences and arts which have been made within that period.

    Some of these have rendered the elements themselves subservient to the purposes of man, have harnessed them to the yoke of his labors and effected the great blessings of moderating his own, of accomplishing what was beyond his feeble force, and extending the comforts of life to a much enlarged circle, to those who had before known its necessaries only. Inspiration plays no less a role in science than it does in the realm of art.

    It is a childish notion to think that a mathematician attains any scientifically valuable results by sitting at his desk with a ruler, calculating machines or other mechanical means. The mathematical imagination of a Weierstrass is naturally quite differently oriented in meaning and result than is the imagination of an artist, and differs basically in quality. But the psychological processes do not differ.

    As given in H. Wright-Mills translators and eds. Essays in Sociology , It is impossible for us, who live in the latter ages of the world, to make observations in criticism, morality, or in any art or science, which have not been touched upon by others. We have little else left us but to represent the common sense of mankind in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon lights. It is not, indeed, strange that the Greeks and Romans should not have carried They were better understood in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, and in the eighteenth century than in the seventeenth.

    But this constant improvement, this natural growth of knowledge, will not altogether account for the immense superiority of the modern writers. The difference is a difference not in degree, but of kind. It is not merely that new principles have been discovered, but that new faculties seem to be exerted. It is not that at one time the human intellect should have made but small progress, and at another time have advanced far; but that at one time it should have been stationary, and at another time constantly proceeding.

    In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals. They reasoned as justly as ourselves on subjects which required pure demonstration. Letter to William Hayley 11 Dec It seems to be considered as a common right to all poets and artists, to live only in the world of their own thoughts, and to be quite unfitted for the world which other men inhabit.

    Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind. Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion.

    Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience. Many arts there are which beautify the mind of man; of all other none do more garnish and beautify it than those arts which are called mathematical. From 'The Joy of Maths'. Collected in Arthur C. Clarke, Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, , Mathematics is, as it were, a sensuous logic, and relates to philosophy as do the arts, music, and plastic art to poetry.

    Aphorism from Selected Aphorisms from the Lyceum Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness.

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    The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds. Also collected in Mysticism and Logic: And Other Essays , Click here or image for larger picture. Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it. Reprinted in Sex, Art, and American Culture , Neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.

    Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. Also collected in Oscariana: Epigrams , Nobody, I suppose, could devote many years to the study of chemical kinetics without being deeply conscious of the fascination of time and change: Nothing retains less of desire in art, in science, than this will to industry, booty, possession. On one occasion committee members were asked by the chairman, who was also in charge of the project, to agree that a certain machine be run at a power which was ten percent lower than the design value.

    One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought. Albert Einstein and Walter Shropshire ed. One rarely hears of the mathematical recitation as a preparation for public speaking. Yet mathematics shares with these studies [foreign languages, drawing and natural science] their advantages, and has another in a higher degree than either of them.

    Most readers will agree that a prime requisite for healthful experience in public speaking is that the attention of the speaker and hearers alike be drawn wholly away from the speaker and concentrated upon the thought. In perhaps no other classroom is this so easy as in the mathematical, where the close reasoning, the rigorous demonstration, the tracing of necessary conclusions from given hypotheses, commands and secures the entire mental power of the student who is explaining, and of his classmates. In what other circumstances do students feel so instinctively that manner counts for so little and mind for so much?

    In what other circumstances, therefore, is a simple, unaffected, easy, graceful manner so naturally and so healthfully cultivated? Mannerisms that are mere affectation or the result of bad literary habit recede to the background and finally disappear, while those peculiarities that are the expression of personality and are inseparable from its activity continually develop, where the student frequently presents, to an audience of his intellectual peers, a connected train of reasoning.

    One would almost wish that our institutions of the science and art of public speaking would put over their doors the motto that Plato had over the entrance to his school of philosophy: In A Scrap-book of Elementary Mathematics: Notes, Recreations, Essays , Our delight in any particular study, art, or science rises and improves in proportion to the application which we bestow upon it. Thus, what was at first an exercise becomes at length an entertainment.

    On the Significance of Science and Art - Wikisource, the free online library

    In The Spectator 2 Aug , No. Philosophy may teach us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of our neighbours, and science resolve the moral sense into a secretion of sugar, but art is what makes the life of each citizen a sacrament. Poets are always ahead of science; all the great discoveries of science have been stated before in poetry. Psychology is in its infancy as a science. I hope, in the interests of art, it will always remain so. Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: Ends and Means , In Collected Essays , Stated no on quotation marks in F.

    Dursvage, 'Desarte', Atlantic Monthly May , Science and art belong to the whole world, and the barriers of nationality vanish before them.

    On the Significance of Science and Art

    Wissenschaft und Kunst gehoren der Welt an, und vor ihhen verschwinden die Schranken der Nationalitat. Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process. Notebooks and Diaries Huxley , Science boasts of the distance of its stars; of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak.

    But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Collected in Tremendous Trifles , Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul. Science has to do with facts, art with phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to facts; and to art, facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena.

    Science is a human activity, and the best way to understand it is to understand the individual human beings who practise it. Science is an art form and not a philosophical method. The great advances in science usually result from new tools rather than from new doctrines. Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature's imagination is richer than ours.

    Reprinted in The Scientist as Rebel , , identified as originally written for a lecture , then published as an essay in the New York Review. Science is continually correcting what it has said. An artistic masterpiece exists for all time Dante does not efface Homer. The Man and his Theories , trans. Geoffrey Strachan , Pro domo et Mundo , , Translated by Harry Zohn ed. Selected Aphorisms , Science is the attempt to discern the order that underlies the chaos of nature; art is the attempt to discern the order that underlies the chaos of man.

    In The Strength To Dream: Literature and the Imagination , Published first published March 1st To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about On the Significance of Science and Art , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about On the Significance of Science and Art. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia.

    Dec 23, Jens rated it liked it Shelves: I enjoy a good rant, especially one of a person who educated himself to know better, but Tolstoy is, in almost all of his criticism of science and art, outdated. At least if one is to reply to specific attacks he issues on the contemporary philosophers at his time which does not mean that his contemporary philosophers were right, he simply did not foresee the astonishing scientific developments in the years to come after his death. Of course, for someone as brilliant a man as Tolstoy was, ther I enjoy a good rant, especially one of a person who educated himself to know better, but Tolstoy is, in almost all of his criticism of science and art, outdated.

    If you ride on as high a horse as Tolstoy does, you set yourself up for mockery when history disproves your predictions. Finally, I really dislike that although Tolstoy had no problems attacking often rightly so the Positivist of Comte and successors for their methodology he still clings to the - in my eyes - unproven and incorrect "cruel state of nature that necessitates men to join forces in a society and further down the road the division of labor" idea, brought forth by Thomas Aquinas and made so tremendously popular by another Thomas surname Hobbes.

    If one were to challenge this concept, almost all of Tolstoy's argumentation would falter. So, all in all I most of the book is OK but considering its compact form, fast read, and my personal inclination toward many of the ideals voiced so mercilessly by Tolstoy, I give it a 2. Jul 29, Igor Stojanov rated it liked it.

    Tolstoy describes the purpose of Art and Science, the purpose of specialization in our daily jobs. Discovering your own talents and utilizing them for the greater good of society is one's duty. He asks several times what is one to do with ones life, and at the end he summarizes with three points: Second, To renounce my consciousness of my own righteousness, my superiority es Tolstoy describes the purpose of Art and Science, the purpose of specialization in our daily jobs.

    Second, To renounce my consciousness of my own righteousness, my superiority especially over other people; and to acknowledge my guilt. Third, To comply with that eternal and indubitable law of humanity,—the labor of my whole being, feeling no shame at any sort of work; to contend with nature for the maintenance of my own life and the lives of others.

    All mankind is an undying organism; men are the particles of that organism, and each one of them has his own special task for the service of others. In the same manner, the cells united in an organism share among them the labor of fight for existence of the whole organism; they magnify the power of one capacity, and weaken another, and unite in one organ, in order the better to supply the requirements of the whole organism.

    This science has always had for its object the knowledge of what is the true ground of the well-being of each individual man, and of all men. I must not fear the truth, whithersoever it may lead me. Oct 29, Aaron Lawson rated it it was amazing. Still applicable today It would do well to make this required reading for art students and various science students as well.

    The question should always be asked of ones work, of what good am I doing for my fellow man? Even to assume that the answer is easy is to not understand what the question is asking. Peter Rittweger rated it liked it Oct 10, Amr Ezzat rated it liked it Jan 04, Matthew Arnold rated it really liked it Feb 20, Rebecca McCaffrey rated it it was ok Jun 20, Jacquie rated it liked it Sep 18, Aaron Adamson rated it liked it May 03, Thirumal Rao rated it really liked it Jan 16, Nickole Schlapkohl rated it it was ok Nov 20, Kallu rated it liked it Apr 25,